Getting stands equal?

If you were hoping the factory could put alignment markers on the stands, any chance of a diagram showing the position of those markers? Presumably they would be in different places relative to the notches we already have once you’ve assigned a stand to each side?

I used the centre bar to find the position in which the tenting matches the bar, then removed the bar again and separated the halves of the keyboard.

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I put a couple of little white stickers on the upper side of the legs the the lowest side of the stand, and this allowed me to play with the angles and keep them symmetrical. My personal preference shown here.

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One set meaning one pair, where the inclination plane of one stand is τ/16 rotated to that of the other stand, right? Please confirm @jesse!

So after my earlier attempt at just leaving a sketch mark inside the inner bowl faded into nothingness, this is my attempt to make a hopefully longer lasting identification. Placing the stands upside down on a flat surface, I visually identified the down slope and marked it with a white sticker:

Jesse probably wanted the notch to mark this same down slope, but the deviations that occurred are:

  1. in the stand where the down slope is halfway between two legs (right side in pic), the notch is τ/8 away, halfway between one of those legs and its neighbour, and,
  2. in the stand where the down slope is towards a single leg (left side in pic), the notch is an extra τ/16 (total 3×τ/16) away because it is midway between two legs on one side of the lowest one.

So the correct design would have the notch towards the down slope, and this means on one stand it would be halfway between two legs and in another it would align with one leg.

Jesse what were the other improvements you said you wished you could make?

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I mean that we have one injection mold for the top half of the stand and one injection mold for the bottom half of the stand. The left and right stands are the same.

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If two marks were added to the top half of the mold, one on a “foot” and the other in the corresponding “notch”, it would be easier for people to figure out which notch to line up with which foot. From there, the stand angle can be adjusted by rotating the two standss together like gears, keeping the angles symmetrical.

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Yes, and that was something the factory was supposed to have done. It’s already in the plans for the next version

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No difference in the alignment of the down slope vs the legs? Then my eyes must be deceiving me, and how about what you wrote here:

?

Can you clarify what you mean? Because the notches are on the stands, and their orientation w.r.t. the feet is fixed…

Anyhow, we only need to clarify the direction of the down slope, because whether the user wants to keep the up slope completely inwards (mandatory in the case of the angled bar) or inwards but away from the user (possible only without bar and may be more preferable to some users like me) it is up to them. There is no alignment of notches required…

Those notches are on the bottom parts of the octopods; the important parts for orientation are the top parts, where the actual slope is. The really clever bit about the design is that the axis of rotation of the top plane (the angled one) relative to the bottom plane doesn’t line up with either a “foot” or a “notch”, but rather halfway between the two. That way, if you align the two octopods such that their top surfaces are co-planar, you can slide them together, and the “foot” of one will line up with the “notch” of the other one, even though the two octopods are identical.

From there, if you rotate the two in opposite directions (one clockwise, the other widdershins), like a pair of interlocking gears, the two top surfaces will mirror each other.

What I was suggesting (and was in @jesse’s design, apparently) was two marks on each of the octopods, almost 180º apart (minus 22.5º because one would be in a “notch”, the other on a “foot”). Then it would be more obvious which “foot” should line up with which “notch” before rotating the keyboard to get the desired tilt. It’s not particularly difficult as it is, but it would make things simpler, and instructions could be written as some thing like, “Line up the red mark of one stand with the blue mark on the other, then rotate both together to the desired angle”.

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Maybe I am doing something wrong, but I find the stands fairly uncomfortable. My arms/elbows naturally rest on my desk while my hands rest on the palm rests of the keyboard (I know, it is said that this is ergonomically bad for you and that your hands should hover over the keyboard rather then rest on them, but I dont know how people can type that way for longer periods of time, so I tend to lazily rest my hands on the keyboard while I type). The stands add a bit of hight to the keyboard though, elevating my hands and bending my wrists so that my arms are less parallel to the desk – which is what makes it uncomfortable for me.

The correct desk height depends on the arm angle, so if your keyboard moves up, you need to move your desk down or your chair up.

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I finally got around to making the visual aid showing how to level the stands that I should have made 3 years ago.

This image has blue lines matching the “tallest” points on the stands and gold points matching the middle of the two nearest octopus legs.

IMG_1547

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So was this problem rectified with the Model 100?

The new stands have little arrows that say “max” on them. Just point them toward each other. (Something I, uh, didn’t notice until now. lol)

The Model 100’s stands have a bit more internal reinforcement and also have arrows pointing to the “high point” on each side.

Best,
Jesse